>> Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Bush pilot Lyndie Anderson lives only for her plane and the open sky. But when she's hired to fly a brooding-but-gorgeous fireman to a forest fire, suddenly she's struggling to douse a burning desire. And although it doesn't show, Griffin Moore starts having feelings for her, too. But he's suffered too much lately to open his heart. So when the two set off sparks, he wonders if Lyndie could be worth the risk...

Not so good. Nothing offensive here, or that I actively even disliked, but White Heat just left me cold. A C.

This was my main problem with this book, really. I was told about how tortured Griffin was because of the fire where he lost so many friends, about how emotionally scarred Lyndie was because she had been raised by a very cold grandfather... but I didn't feel it. I was told about how they wanted each other like crazy, but I didn't feel it. And I was told about how they slowly started having more tender feelings for each other, but I didn't feel it either.

In fact, what roused my emotions the most about this book were the editing and Spanish language issues. (WARNING: rant coming up!)

If you're going to set a book in Mexico, would it kill you to have someone with some knowledge of Spanish check over the words in that language? Someone should have caught that "vamanos" should be "vámosnos" and that "una mapa" should be "un mapa". The literal translation of "you're full of shit" into "estás llena de caca" did give me pause, though (even if "caca" is more poop than shit, really). There's no such expression in my kind of Spanish, but who knows if there isn't in Mexico, with their Anglicized "aparcar el carro" for "park the car", instead of our "estacionar el auto". But I'm really going off into a tangent here, aren't I?

Still speaking of editing, even the English editing sucked. I'm pretty tolerant about things like this, and just tend to slide over typos and so on, but this was just excessive enough that it threw me out of the story a few times... sometimes I even had to stop to figure out exactly what stuff was supposed to mean, only to realize it was an editing mistake. Stuff like "he carved his hand around his ear" instead of "curved", "missionary" for "mercenary" (it took me quite a while to figure out why Lyndie thought Griffin was accusing her of being missionary when he remarked she received money for doing a certain thing, I can tell you that!), "what is it you what" instead of "what is it you want", "itself" when "themselves" should have been used... the examples were endless.

At about 320 pages, this wasn't a long book, but it felt much, much longer!